Several years ago there was an add-on product that gave many Citrix-like functions to Terminal Server called New Moon Canaveral iQ. This was a cool little product although no one really used it. In May 2003, New Moon was bought by Tarantella.

Several years ago there was an add-on product that gave many Citrix-like functions to Terminal Server called New Moon Canaveral iQ. This was a cool little product although no one really used it.

In May 2003, New Moon was bought by Tarantella. (Coverage of this was actually my first blog entry ever—Doc ID# 1.) Tarantella released Canaveral iQ 2.0 and then changed the name of the product to “Secure Global Desktop, Terminal Server Edition” (SGD-TSE) for the 2.1 release. They cranked out a few new versions over the next few years, although they struggled as a company and were ultimately bought by Sun Microsystems in May of 2005 for 90 cents a share.

A few months later (in July 2005), Sun licensed the source code and distribution rights of SGD-TSE to the parent company of the European SGD-TSE distributor, Propalms. According to the press release, "Propalms will assume all of Tarantella's current TSE customer obligations, and Tarantella's TSE development team will join Propalms immediately." It also mentioned that "Propalms has the option to purchase certain of [sic] the TSE intellectual property outright at a future date." It seems that Propalms is on the “rent-to-own” plan for SGD-TSE.

Propalms appears to be a pretty unknown company, and a Google search for "Propalms" at the time of the acquisition turned up the Tarantella press release as the first result and no other relevant websites. The contact email address for Propalms is at “arctech.co.uk” which is the UK distributor of Tarantella's products, but there is no other mention of the license agreement or "Propalms" on that site.

In addition to the SGD-TSE product, it appears that Propalms got Tarantella’s old website from Sun. They pretty much copied the site over directly, as many of the links on it point back to Tarantella.com or simply don’t work. All of the download links still point to Tarantella.com, and the case studies and customers pages still have Tarantella plastered all over them.

Tarantella's old homepage

Propalm's new homepage

The bottom line, though, is that hopefully Propalms will be able to get their name out there and try to appease some of the fears that have been floating around about the future of the SGD-TSE product. With luck they'll be around long enough to be on the next version of the SBC Software Roundup.

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I just had a look at the Tarantella site and noticed you can get a free (perpetual) single user version of SGD-EE (the version Sun kept). Definately a good way of getting IT people interested (and giving them secure access to their home networks over SSL)

As far as I know there will be released a version 4.1 of TSE within two months. I hope there is some enhancements to the DMZ gateway product. It's performance is really bad. Regarding the free license, note that this is only for the Tarantella SGD Enterprise edition. The TSE edition only has a 30 day evaluation license.

as a former reseller and integration provider of tarantella sgd (actually since the canaveral 1.5 product) I'm happy to say sun didn't tank this product. if you reside in the us and wish to try this out. contact tridex systems. www.tridexsys.com. they are the us company providing support and sales of the sgd tse product. I'm in the process of deploying 4.0. I really hope this product continues to grow. its been a great value add for ts. michael crabtree director of consulting services carlin it services

Its a real shame that such a great product has been loaded down by so much corporate B.S.

From the time I purchased this product till today I have been nothing but pleased with the software and totaly ticked off countless times with Tarantella.

I think it was really nice of them to bail on us. There is no Knowledge base available and no user group available. After 30 minutes of hunting I still couldn't find a reference on their website about the TSE product being sold.

I'm glad that I only purchased 20 user lic. Our company was looking at buying almost 850. The software works great for the most part but I am really sick of dealing with these guys.

I am a SBC Consultant and working with Citrix Tarantella and other SBC Products. TSE is really such a good product and extremly price sensitive. But it is being ruiened in corporate dealings. I suggest you should try "Ericom's Hostview". Its a very good product offers all the facilites Citrix or TSE are offering. I have found it very stable. For more information about this product you can mail me at arun-srivastava@excite.com

ORIGINAL: Guest

Its a real shame that such a great product has been loaded down by so much corporate B.S.

From the time I purchased this product till today I have been nothing but pleased with the software and totaly ticked off countless times with Tarantella.

I think it was really nice of them to bail on us. There is no Knowledge base available and no user group available. After 30 minutes of hunting I still couldn't find a reference on their website about the TSE product being sold.

I'm glad that I only purchased 20 user lic. Our company was looking at buying almost 850. The software works great for the most part but I am really sick of dealing with these guys.

In chasing up information on what has happened to Tarantella and some others, I Googled the phrase “Secure Global Desktop, Terminal Server Edition” and two results show. This page, and http://www.propalms.com/index.php?page=news_item&id=3. However the ProPalms page is now blank with a posting date of 28th June 2007. For a while, the original post can still be seen by clicking on the "cached" link on the Google search page which confirms what Brian says, but is there something going on that we don't know about? Someone with some detective skills may be interested in chasing it up to find out.